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he authors disagree with Lever-Tracy's observation that the lack of interest in climate change among sociologists is driven by a widespread suspicion of naturalistic explanations, teleological arguments and environmental determinism.

While conceding that Lever-Tracy's observation may be partially true, the authors argue that more important processes are at play, including cautiousness on the part of sociologists to step into a heavily politicized debate; methodological differences with the natural sciences; and sensitivity about locating climate change in the longue durée.

Secondly, while Lever-Tracy argues that "natural and social change are now in lockstep with each other, operating on the same scales," and that therefore a multidisciplinary approach is needed, Grundmann and Stehr suggest that the true challenge is interdisciplinarity, as opposed to multidisciplinarity.

Thirdly, and this possibly the most striking observation of the article, Grundmann and Stehr challenge Lever-Tracy's argument that natural scientists have successfully made the case for anthropogenic climate change, and that therefore social scientists should cease to endlessly question this scientific consensus on the basis of a skeptical postmodern 'deconstructionism'.

As opposed to both Lever-Tracy's positivist view and the radical postmodern deconstructionist view, Grundmann and Stehr take the social constructivist view, which argues that that every idea is socially constructed and therefore the product of human interpretation and communication. This raises the 'intractable' specters of discourse and framing, to which we will return in a second.

Finally, Lever-Tracy holds that climate change needs to be posited "firmly at the heart of the discipline." Grundmann and Stehr, however, emphasize that "if this is going to [be] more than wishful thinking, we need to carefully consider the prospects of such an enterprise."

The importance of framing climate change in a way that allows it to resonate with the concerns of the average citizen is an issue that the Breakthrough Institute has long emphasized. Especially the apocalyptic politics of fear that is often associated with climate change tends to have a counterproductive effect on public opinion. Realizing this, Grundmann and Stehr make an important warning to sociologists: "the inherent alarmism in many social science contributions on climate change merely repeats the central message provided by mainstream media." In other words, it fails to provide the kind of distantiated observation needed to approach the issue with at least a mild degree of objectivity or impartiality.

While this tension is symptomatic of many social scientific attempts to get involved, we propose to study these very underlying assumptions. For example, we should ask: Does the dramatization of events lead to effective political responses? Do we need a politics of fear? Is scientific consensus instrumental for sound policies? And more generally, what are the relations between a changing technological infrastructure, social shifts and belief systems? What contribution can bottom-up initiatives have in fighting climate change? What roles are there for markets, hierarchies and voluntary action? How was it possible that the 'fight against climate change' rose from a marginal discourse to a hegemonic one (from heresy to dogma)? And will the discourse remain hegemonic or will too much pub¬lic debate about climate change lead to 'climate change fatigue'?

In this respect, Grundmann and Stehr make another crucial observation: "the severity of a problem does not mean that we as sociologists should forget about our analytical apparatus." Bringing the analytical apparatus of sociology back in, the hunting season for positivist approaches to knowledge and nature is opened. Grundmann and Stehr consequently criticize not only Lever-Tracy's unspoken adherence to a positivist nature-society duality, taking instead a more dialectical Marxian approach to the relationship between man and his environment, but they also criticize her idea that incremental increases in our scientific knowledge of climate change and its impacts will automatically coalesce into successful and meaningful policy responses.

Political decisions about climate change are made on the basis of scientific research and a host of other (economic, political, cultural) considerations. Regarding the scientific dimension, it is a common perception (one that Lever-Tracy seems to share) that the more knowledge we have, the better the political response will be. This is the assumption of the linear model of policy-making that has been dominant in the past but debunked time and again (Godin, 2006). What we increasingly realize is that knowl¬edge creation leads to an excess of information and 'objectivity' (Sarewitz, 2000). Even the consensual mechanisms of the IPCC lead to an increase in options because knowledge about climate change increases.

Instead, Grundmann and Stehr propose to look carefully at how we frame climate change socially and whether the hegemonic climate discourse is actually contributing to successful political action or hampering it. Defending this social constructivist approach from the unfounded allegation that it would play into the hands of the climate skeptics, the authors note that defining climate change as a social construction ... is not to diminish its importance, relevance, or reality. It simply means that sociologists study the process whereby something (like anthropogenic climate change) is transformed from a conjecture into an accepted fact. With regard to policy, we observe a near exclusive focus on carbon dioxide emissions. This framing has proven counter productive, as the Hartwell paper and other sources demonstrate (see Eastin et al., 2010; Prins et al., 2010). Reducing carbon emissions in the short term is among the most difficult tasks. More progress could be made by a re-framing of the issue, not as an issue of human sinfulness, but of human dignity. [emphasis added]

These observations allow the authors to come full circle, arriving right back at their first observation about the real reasons why sociologists have so far kept silent on climate change. Somehow, "there seems to be the curious conviction that lest you want to be accused of helping the fossil fuel lobbies and the climate skeptics, you better keep quiet."

But the problem is deeper than simply intellectual inertia. It goes back, ultimately, to the unconsidered differentiations we make—at every moment when we distinguish among objects—between those in the foreground of our consciousness and the background places in which the objects happen to be situated. Moreover, this distinction creates a hierarchy of objects. We are conscious not only of the skin that encloses and defines the object, but of bits and pieces of that object, each of which must have its own “skin.” That is the problem of anatomization. A car has a motor and brakes and a transmission and an outer body that, at appropriate moments, become separate objects of our consciousness, objects that at least some knowledgeable person recognizes as coherent entities.

Evelyn Fox Keller sees “The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture” as a consequence of our false division of the world into living objects without sufficient consideration of the external milieu in which they are embedded, since organisms help create effective environments through their own life activities.

The central point of her analysis has been that gender itself (as opposed to sex) is socially constructed, and that construction has influenced the development of science:If there is a single point on which all feminist scholarship…has converged, it is the importance of recognizing the social construction of gender…. All of my work on gender and science proceeds from this basic recognition. My endeavor has been to call attention to the ways in which the social construction of a binary opposition between “masculine” and “feminine” has influenced the social construction of science.

major critical concern of Fox Keller’s present book is the widespread attempt to partition in some quantitative way the contribution made to human variation by differences in biological inheritance, that is, differences in genes, as opposed to differences in life experience. She wants to make clear a distinction between analyzing the relative strength of the causes of variation among individuals and groups, an analysis that is coherent in principle, and simply assigning the relative contributions of biological and environmental causes to the value of some character in an individual

It is, for example, all very well to say that genetic variation is responsible for 76 percent of the observed variation in adult height among American women while the remaining 24 percent is a consequence of differences in nutrition. The implication is that if all variation in nutrition were abolished then 24 percent of the observed height variation among individuals in the population in the next generation would disappear. To say, however, that 76 percent of Evelyn Fox Keller’s height was caused by her genes and 24 percent by her nutrition does not make sense. The nonsensical implication of trying to partition the causes of her individual height would be that if she never ate anything she would still be three quarters as tall as she is.

In fact, Keller is too optimistic about the assignment of causes of variation even when considering variation in a population. As she herself notes parenthetically, the assignment of relative proportions of population variation to different causes in a population depends on there being no specific interaction between the causes.

Keller’s rather casual treatment of the interaction between causal factors in the case of the drummers, despite her very great sophistication in analyzing the meaning of variation, is a symptom of a fault that is deeply embedded in the analytic training and thinking of both natural and social scientists. If there are several variable factors influencing some phenomenon, how are we to assign the relative importance to each in determining total variation? Let us take an extreme example. Suppose that we plant seeds of each of two different varieties of corn in two different locations with the following results measured in bushels of corn produced (see Table 1). There are differences between the varieties in their yield from location to location and there are differences between locations from variety to variety. So, both variety and location matter. But there is no average variation between locations when averaged over varieties or between varieties when averaged over locations. Just by knowing the variation in yield associated with location and variety separately does not tell us which factor is the more important source of variation; nor do the facts of location and variety exhaust the description of that variation.

Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you'd have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you'd use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you'd use a different verb form.

Clearly, languages require different things of their speakers. Does this mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages?

For some scholars, the answer to these questions has been an obvious yes. Just look at the way people talk, they might say. Certainly, speakers of different languages must attend to and encode strikingly different aspects of the world just so they can use their language properly. Scholars on the other side of the debate don't find the differences in how people talk convincing. All our linguistic utterances are sparse, encoding only a small part of the information we have available. Just because English speakers don't include the same information in their verbs that Russian and Turkish speakers do doesn't mean that English speakers aren't paying attention to the same things; all it means is that they're not talking about them. It's possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently.

Believers in cross-linguistic differences counter that everyone does not pay attention to the same things: if everyone did, one might think it would be easy to learn to speak other languages. Unfortunately, learning a new language (especially one not closely related to those you know) is never easy; it seems to require paying attention to a new set of distinctions. Whether it's distinguishing modes of being in Spanish, evidentiality in Turkish, or aspect in Russian, learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary: it requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say.

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do? The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses.8 Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound. Such quirks are pervasive in language; gender, for example, applies to all nouns, which means that it is affecting how people think about anything that can be designated by a noun.

How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." To describe a "bridge," which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "peaceful," "pretty," and "slender," and the Spanish speakers said "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering." This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world.

Even basic aspects of time perception can be affected by language. For example, English speakers prefer to talk about duration in terms of length (e.g., "That was a short talk," "The meeting didn't take long"), while Spanish and Greek speakers prefer to talk about time in terms of amount, relying more on words like "much" "big", and "little" rather than "short" and "long" Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration, English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information, estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the screen.)

An important question at this point is: Are these differences caused by language per se or by some other aspect of culture? Of course, the lives of English, Mandarin, Greek, Spanish, and Kuuk Thaayorre speakers differ in a myriad of ways. How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures? One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we've taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.6 In practical terms, it means that when you're learning a new language, you're not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking. Beyond abstract or complex domains of thought like space and time, languages also meddle in basic aspects of visual perception — our ability to distinguish colors, for example. Different languages divide up the color continuum differently: some make many more distinctions between colors than others, and the boundaries often don't line up across languages.

To test whether differences in color language lead to differences in color perception, we compared Russian and English speakers' ability to discriminate shades of blue. In Russian there is no single word that covers all the colors that English speakers call "blue." Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category. For English speakers, all these shades are still designated by the same word, "blue," and there are no comparable differences in reaction time. Further, the Russian advantage disappears when subjects are asked to perform a verbal interference task (reciting a string of digits) while making color judgments but not when they're asked to perform an equally difficult spatial interference task (keeping a novel visual pattern in memory). The disappearance of the advantage when performing a verbal task shows that language is normally involved in even surprisingly basic perceptual judgments — and that it is language per se that creates this difference in perception between Russian and English speakers.

What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get treated the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjective and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun's gender. For example, to say something like "my chair was old" in Russian (moy stul bil' stariy), you'd need to make every word in the sentence agree in gender with "chair" (stul), which is masculine in Russian. So you'd use the masculine form of "my," "was," and "old." These are the same forms you'd use in speaking of a biological male, as in "my grandfather was old." If, instead of speaking of a chair, you were speaking of a bed (krovat'), which is feminine in Russian, or about your grandmother, you would use the feminine form of "my," "was," and "old."

Suppose I concede to Prinz that reason cannot settle differences in moral values and sentiments. Difference of opinion doesn’t mean that there isn’t a true or rational answer. In fact, there are many reasons why our cognition, emotional reactions or previous values could be wrong or irrational — and why people would not pick up on their deficiencies. In his article, Prinz uses the case of sociopaths, who simply lack certain cognitive abilities. There are many reasons other than sociopathy why human beings can get things wrong, morally speaking, often and badly. It could be that people are unable to adopt a more objective morality because of their circumstances — from brain deficiencies to lack of access to relevant information. But, again, none of this amounts to an argument against the existence of objective morality.

As it turns out, Prinz’s conception of objective morality does not quite reflect the thinking of most people who believe in objective morality. He writes that: “Objectivism holds that there is one true morality binding upon all of us.” This is a particular strand of moral realism, but there are many. For instance, one can judge some moral precepts as better than others, yet remain open to the fact that there are probably many different ways to establish a good society. This is a pluralistic conception of objective morality which doesn’t assume one absolute moral truth. For all that has been said, Sam Harris’ idea of a moral landscape does help illustrate this concept. Thinking in terms of better and worse morality gets us out of relativism and into an objectivist approach. The important thing to note is that one need not go all the way to absolute objectivity to work toward a rational, non-arbitrary morality.

even Prinz admits that “Relativism does not entail that we should tolerate murderous tyranny. When someone threatens us or our way of life, we are strongly motivated to protect ourselves.” That is, there are such things as better and worse values: the worse ones kill us, the better ones don’t. This is a very broad criterion, but it is an objective standard. Prinz is arguing for a tighter moral relativism – a sort of stripped down objective morality that is constricted by nature, experience, and our (modest) reasoning abilities.

I proposed at the discussion that a more objective morality could be had with the help of a robust public discourse on the issues at hand. Prinz does not necessarily disagree. He wrote that “Many people have overlapping moral values, and one can settle debates by appeal to moral common ground.” But Prinz pointed out a couple of limitations on public discourse. For example, the agreements we reach on “moral common ground” are often exclusive of some, and abstract in content. Consider the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, a seemingly good example of global moral agreement. Yet, it was ratified by a small sample of 48 countries, and it is based on suspiciously Western sounding language. Everyone has a right to education and health care, but — Prinz pointed out during the discussion — what level of education and health care? Still, the U.N. declaration was passed 48-0 with just 8 abstentions (Belarus, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, USSR, Yugoslavia, South Africa and Saudi Arabia). It includes 30 articles of ethical standards agreed upon by 48 countries around the world. Such a document does give us more reason to think that public discourse can lead to significant agreement upon values.

Reason might not be able to arrive at moral truths, but it can push us to test and question the rationality of our values — a crucial part in the process that leads to the adoption of new, or modified values. The only way to reduce disputes about morality is to try to get people on the same page about their moral goals. Given the above, this will not be easy, and perhaps we shouldn’t be too optimistic in our ability to employ reason to figure things out. But reason is still the best, and even only, tool we can wield, and while it might not provide us with a truly objective morality, it’s enough to save us from complete moral relativism.

they are saying that this study is evidence that ADHD is not purely social. They are not saying that it is purely or even mostly genetic. In fact, only 15% of subjects with ADHD demonstrated increased CNVs. This study is a proof of concept more than anything, demonstrating that genetic makeup can contribute, at least in some cases, to the clinical syndrome of ADHD.

This illustrates, Bloom says, that people have a rudimentary sense of justice from a very early age. This doesn’t make people naturally good. If you give a 3-year-old two pieces of candy and ask him if he wants to share one of them, he will almost certainly say no. It’s not until age 7 or 8 that even half the children are willing to share. But it does mean that social norms fall upon prepared ground. We come equipped to learn fairness and other virtues.

If you ask for donations with the photo and name of one sick child, you are likely to get twice as much money than if you had asked for donations with a photo and the names of eight children. Our minds respond more powerfully to the plight of an individual than the plight of a group.

If you are in a bad mood you will make harsher moral judgments than if you’re in a good mood or have just seen a comedy. As Elizabeth Phelps of New York University points out, feelings of disgust will evoke a desire to expel things, even those things unrelated to your original mood. General fear makes people risk-averse. Anger makes them risk-seeking.

People who behave morally don’t generally do it because they have greater knowledge; they do it because they have a greater sensitivity to other people’s points of view.

The moral naturalists differ over what role reason plays in moral judgments. Some, like Haidt, believe that we make moral judgments intuitively and then construct justifications after the fact. Others, like Joshua Greene of Harvard, liken moral thinking to a camera. Most of the time we rely on the automatic point-and-shoot process, but occasionally we use deliberation to override the quick and easy method.

For people wary of abstract theorizing, it’s nice to see people investigating morality in ways that are concrete and empirical. But their approach does have certain implicit tendencies. They emphasize group cohesion over individual dissent. They emphasize the cooperative virtues, like empathy, over the competitive virtues, like the thirst for recognition and superiority. At this conference, they barely mentioned the yearning for transcendence and the sacred, which plays such a major role in every human society. Their implied description of the moral life is gentle, fair and grounded. But it is all lower case. So far, at least, it might not satisfy those who want their morality to be awesome, formidable, transcendent or great.

Second Life, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter — has shifted not only how we spend our time but also how we construct identity. For her coming book, “Alone Together,” Sherry Turkle, a professor at M.I.T., interviewed more than 400 children and parents about their use of social media and cellphones. Among young people especially she found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculptured and refined in response to public opinion. “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,” she explained. “But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.” Referring to “The Lonely Crowd,” the landmark description of the transformation of the American character from inner- to outer-directed, Turkle added, “Twitter is outer-directedness cubed.”

when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy? The risk of the performance culture, of the packaged self, is that it erodes the very relationships it purports to create, and alienates us from our own humanity.

I am trying to gain some perspective on the perpetual performer’s self-consciousness. That involves trying to sort out the line between person and persona, the public and private self.

Chomsky is hesitant to accept the recent claims of language’s profound influence on thought. “I’m rather skeptical about all of this, though there probably are some marginal effects,” he said.

Some advocates of the Whorfian view find support in studies of how languages convey spatial orientation. English and Dutch speakers describe orientation from an egocentric frame of reference (to my left or right). Mayan speakers use a geocentric frame of reference (to the north or south).

Does this mean they think about space in fundamentally different ways? Not exactly, said Lila Gleitman, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania. Since we ordinarily assume that others talk like us, she explained, vague instructions like “arrange it the same way” will be interpreted in whatever orientation (egocentric or geocentric) is most common in our language. “That’s going to influence how you solve an ambiguous problem, but it doesn’t mean that’s the way you think, or must think,” said Gleitman. In fact, she repeated the experiment with unambiguous instructions, providing cues to indicate whether objects should be arranged north-south or left-right. She found that people in both languages are just as good at arranging objects in either orientation.

Similarly, Anna Papafragou, a psychologist at the University of Delaware, thinks that the extent of language’s effect on thought has been somewhat exaggerated.

Papafragou compared how long Greek and English speakers paid attention to clip-art animation sequences, for example, a man skating towards a snowman. By measuring their eye movements, Papafragou was able to tell which parts of the scene held their gaze the longest. Because English speakers generally use verbs that describe manner of motion, like slide and skip, she predicted they would pay more attention to what was moving (the skates). Since Greeks use verbs that describe path, like approach and ascend, they should pay more attention to endpoint of the motion (the snowman). She found that this was true only when people had to describe the scene; when asked to memorize it, attention patterns were nearly identical. According to Papafragou, when people need to speak about what they see, they’ll focus on the parts relevant for planning sentences. Otherwise, language does not show much of an effect on attention.

“Each language is a bright transparent medium through which our thoughts may pass, relatively undistorted,” said Gleitman.

Others think that language does, in fact, introduce some distortion. Linguist Guy Deutscher of the University of Manchester in the U.K. suggests that while language can’t prevent you from thinking anything, it does compel you to think in specific ways. Language forces you to habitually pay attention to different aspects of the world.

For example, many languages assign genders to nouns (“bridge” is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish). A study by cognitive psychologist Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University found that German speakers were more likely to describe “bridge” with feminine terms like elegant and slender, while Spanish speakers picked words like sturdy and towering. Having to constantly keep track of gender, Deutscher suggests, may subtly change the way native speakers imagine object’s characteristics.

However, this falls short of the extreme view some ascribe to Whorf: that language actually determines thought. According to Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist and linguist at Harvard University, three things have to hold for the Whorfian hypothesis to be true: speakers of one language should find it nearly impossible to think like speakers of another language; the differences in language should affect actual reasoning; and the differences should be caused by language, not just correlated with it. Otherwise, we may just be dealing with a case of “crying Whorf.”

But even mild claims may reveal complexities in the relationship between language and thought. “You can’t actually separate language, thought and perception,” said Debi Roberson, a psychologist at the University of Essex in the U.K. “All of these processes are going on, not just in parallel, but interactively.”

Language may not, as the Gaelic proverb suggests, form our entire world. But it will continue to provide insights into our thoughts—whether as a window, a looking glass, or a distorted mirror.

Value-free science? Many scientists think that science is about objectivity and “just the facts, ma’am.” Not so fast, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science have argued now for a number of decades. While I certainly have no sympathy for the extreme postmodernist position exemplified by the so-called “strong programme” in sociology of science — that science is entirely the result of social construction — there are several interesting and delicate facets of the problem to explore.

there are values embedded in the practice of science itself: testability, accuracy, generality, simplicity, and the like. Needless to say, few if any of these can be justified within science itself — there is no experiment confirming Occam’s razor, for instance.

Then there are the many moral dimensions of science practice, both in terms of ethical issues internal to science (fraud) and of the much broader ones affecting society at large (societal consequences of research and technological advances).

There is also the issue of diversity in science. Until very recently, and in many fields still today, science has largely been an affair conducted by white males. And this has historically resulted in a large amount of nonsense — say about gender differences, or ethnic differences — put forth as objective knowledge and accepted by the public because it has the imprimatur of science. But, you might say, that was the past, now we have corrected the errors and moved on. Except that such an argument ignores the fact that there is little reason to think that only we have gotten it just right, that the current generation is somehow immune from an otherwise uninterrupted history of science-based blunders.

Regarding Occam's Razor, there is a justification for it based on probability theory, see:http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/01/12/occams-razor-bayes-theorem/http://telescoper.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/bayes-razor/http://www.stat.duke.edu/~berger/papers/ockham.html

another interesting dimension of the relationship between values and science concerns which scientific questions we should pursue (and, often, fund with public money). Scientists often act as they ought to be the only arbiters here, and talk as if some questions were “obviously” intrinsically important. But when your research is costly and paid for by the public, perhaps society deserves a bit more of an explanation concerning why millions of dollars ought to be spent on obscure problems that apparently interest only a handful of university professors concentrated in one or a few countries.

Can any Singaporean honestly say the she/he can conceive of a fellow Singaporean setting himself or herself on fire along Orchard Road or Shenton Way, as a result of desperate economic pressures or financial constraints? Can we even fathom the social and economic pressures that mobilized a whole people to protest and overthrow a corrupt, US-backed regime? (that is, not during elections time) Singapore has real problems, the People’s Action Party has its real problems, and there is indeed much room for improvement. Yet such irresponsible reporting by one of the esteemed newspapers from the UK is utterly disappointing, not constructive in the least sense, and utterly misrepresents our political situation (and may potentially provoke more irrationality in our society, leading people to ‘believe’ their affinity with their Arab peers which leads to more radicalism).